The Story Of Bayonetta So Far

As Platinum Games’ crown jewel Bayonetta 3 is about to release soon, it is important for first-time players to have a brief history of the last two installments. So to play and understand the stylized hack-and-slash game by Nintendo, here is a briefing of the entire Bayonetta timeline.

Also to be noted is that this article will speculate how the Bayonetta storyline might turn out in the future. Additionally, how an alternate timeline be the key feature of the upcoming game?

The Armageddon, Cereza, and the War

The story of Bayonetta is pretty complex to understand, but it can be best defined as ‘what you see is not always the truth’. The game chronologically starts from an ancient split, called the Armageddon, of a single reality into three universes controlled by three rulers: the realm of light was ruled by angel Jubileus, the realm of darkness was ruled by demon Queen Sheba and the realm of chaos was given to Aesir.

Notably, Aesir was the main deity who made the earth and all its inhabitants, or the humans. But as time passed, Aesir became sad as he saw that humans were weak and didn’t have enough power to control their destinies.

Thus, to make things more spiced up, he divided himself into two parts collectively called ‘the Eye of the World’. The left part of the eye was filled with darkness and those who gained it were called Umbra Witches, while the right part was the eye of light, controlled by the Lumen Sages.

Cut to a couple of hundred years later, a sacred pact gets broken as Lumen Sage Balder falls in love with Umbra Witch Rosa and they together give birth to a girl named Cereza, or Cherry in Spanish. The birth of Cereza results in a cold war between the two clans as they agree to disagree on the breakage of a forbidden law between them stating, “The intersection of light and dark would bring calamity to this earth.”

But as everyone goes against the girl, the Umbra Witches agree to let her live, but on the condition that she will never be taught magic. A shy Cereza, still having great potential in magic and combat, lives peacefully with her parents, when one day the war between the clans finally breaks and the cold war turns into a full-fledged one. But as everyone else was busy fighting, Cereza, along with her childhood friend Jeanne, learn to perform magic and combat to take part in the war.

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Soon after, the war comes to an end when Cereza’s mother Rosa dies. This incident makes Cereza vulnerable and hopeless as she stops fighting. With the entire Lumen Clan already dead, except for Cereza’s father Balder, Jeanne decides to put her friend in a deep slumber in order to stop anyone and everyone from using Cereza’s magical powers as a source of evil. Thus Jeanne casts a spell on Cereza making her sleep in a coffin that she buries under a lake. While Balder gets thrown into the future.

Rise of Bayonetta

500 years after the great war between the two clans, the only thriving species is humans. But Balder, who was thrown into the future, is now corrupted and wishes for power. So he decides to unite ‘the Eye of the World’ to make Aesir rise from his powers and force Jubileus and Queen Sheba to combine their realms with the realm of chaos to again form a single realm. And for his plans to work, he needs the last strongest remaining Umbra Witch, that is Cereza.

So Balder hires a journalist named Antonio Redgrave, who, along with his son Luka, finds Cereza’s coffin. But as he opens it, the immense negative energy from it attracts the angels from the Paradiso to attack her. While she had already lost her memory, Cereza tries to fight off the angels but gets Antonio killed in the process. But as the journalist’s son Luka was a human and wasn’t able to see the angels, he thinks that Cereza is the real culprit of his father’s death.

While he runs off from the site, Cereza tries to remember her name, but to no avail. Later she adopted the name of Bayonetta as her first name, which is not yet disclosed how she got it. Cereza, now dubbed Bayonetta, then fights with the angels for the next 20 years, then finally comes in contact with her informer Enzo, who tells her about an ancient artifact called the Eyes of the World.

She already has a red gemstone and concludes that she can essentially get her memories back if she walks on her destined path. And so she does when she arrives in the city of Vigrid, where she meets some old friends-turned-foes, namely Jeanne and Luka. Although Jeanne at first wasn’t made clear why she was fighting Bayonetta, it later becomes clear that she was being brainwashed. While Bayonetta never met Luka upfront after the incident, the boy who now also became a journalist deems Bayonetta as his arch-nemesis.

Remembering the past and return of memories

The story takes a turn when Bayonetta, while on her quest, finds none other than Cereza, but in a younger version. Bayonetta, already suffering from memory loss, thinks that Cereza is just a lost child and wants to unite with her father. Later, while confronted by Luka and the Angels of Paradiso, Bayonetta gets busy fighting with the angels and Luka decides to take care of little Cereza as he thinks Bayonetta is the culprit of his father’s death and might be dangerous to Cereza as well.

READ MORE: Is The Bayonetta 3 Controversy Worth It?

But during the fight, Cereza lends Luka her powers that make him capable of watching the attacking angels the make him realize that his father was not killed by Bayonetta but by the angels of Paradiso. Furthering into the story, Jeanne gets her consciousness back as she realizes that the main culprit behind all this is Balder, who brainwashed her into attacking and capturing Bayonetta. She then returns to her friend and thus Bayonetta gets two new allies to help her fight the corrupted Balder.

After defeating her father, who escapes in the climax of the first game, Bayonetta goes deep inside Balder’s lair and finds a portal. Entering the portal with Cereza, she finds herself back at the same time when she was a kid. She then leaves Cereza at her time and tells her to be confident in her ways. Returning to her real-time, she then finds that the world has changed a little with her remembering two new timelines now instead of one.

Bayonetta 2 and the story that follows

In the second installment of the game, Jeanne’s soul gets sucked into hell and Bayonetta has to travel there to save her friend. In her journey, she encounters a boy named Loki who helps her in her journey, but as the story progresses, Bayonetta discovers that Loki is the most integral part of the story as he is the light side of the Aesir and Loki’s other half Loptr is the dark side of Aesir.

Loki then helps Bayonetta defeat Aesir, along with her father Balder, who realizes that he was manipulated by the king of the Chaos realm to go against his family. Unfortunately, though Aesir gets released and regains his power. Loki then destroys the left and right eyes of the world to weaken Aesir.

Bayonetta then fights Aesir defeating him and saving her friend Jeanne. But as Aesir tries to get away by the end of the game, Balder absorbs Aesir inside him, which later corrupted the Lumen Sage, turning him from a kind man to an evil one. He then returns to the past, making it clear that it was actually Aesir who corrupted Balder into destroying his clan and starting the war.

Bayonetta 3 and what can transpire?

As it is now clear that Bayonetta created a separate timeline when she went to her past in the first game, it can now be speculated that the third installment of the game might be set around the premise of her finding her alternate self and even fighting with or alongside her to stop Aesir yet again, as well as the other rulers of the rest two dimensions.

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